Four floppy-haired rock gods walked into a photographer's 60s studio. They clustered there on a bench like schoolboys readying for a class photoshoot, giggling in bloodied white lab coats while being draped with dismembered baby-dolls and chunks of raw beef. As Bob took shots, glimpses of a wretched future streamed through his mind like distracting flashes from his camera. His heart jumped, beating as if he had leaped from one spot to another just to capture the most surreal image ever. He was even surprised. So astonished that he could not believe what he was seeing or hearing.
"Decapitate Paul's head!" yelled John while moving his thumb across his friend's throat.
Bob simply gave him a nod. He just couldn't reply because he was documenting everything through the lens. He had no idea that this conceptual artwork would become an infamous "pop art" collectible.
"This is gross!" protested George. "This isn't cool anymore, it's naive and stupid." He looked at them one by one, soliciting for support to stop the sick joke that they've wanted to be serialized but got nothing.
"Don't bore us with the usual, George," countered John, instigating that their dark humor should be the theme for the tableau. "We're bigger than Jesus anyway."
"Bro, it's not that offensive," opined Paul, convincing George to play along.
"Yeah, think of the Vietnam conflict," added John. "War is cruel and the sheep out there accepted it, so they'll accept this too."
Ringo had nothing to spit out. But John was wrong. There was public outrage against the album's cover design. Capitol Records had printed some 750,000 covers but the company's owner requested that they be returned to them for repackaging.
"If they had asked me about the Butcher shot, it would have been less frightening. It wasn't my fault that it reached America. That photo with other images was snatched from me!" explained Bob forty years later during an interview.
"Do you know why I did that? Beatlemania is bullshit idolatry! I want to show everyone that they are not gods. So I surrounded them with slabs of meat because they are flesh and blood. Those dolls there are like their female fans who are willing to tear them apart. Offstage those girls would have ripped them to pieces!"
Despite the hullabaloo over the Beatles Butcher cover which costs 15 cents in 1966, its First State market value after fifty years rose to nearly one million dollars!
Post-interview, when the photog's camera flashed to capture Bob, he suddenly returned to 1964. He was shocked to find himself in a hotel in Australia. There he held a VIP ticket and a weird memo saying he would meet the Fab Four for the first time.
At that momentous event, he was approached by a gentleman named Brian and, surprisingly, he applied to him as a manager.
"Sorry, I'm not a Beatle. I don't want to be managed," Bob replied without hesitation. "I would love to shoot all four of them though." ■ [1]
[500 words]
Before you believe the speculative fiction you’ve read above, let me introduce you to the six characters:
Bob (Robert Whitaker) - Beatles' official photographer for a triptych art called "A Somnambulant Adventure."
Brian Epstein - Beatles' manager
The Beatles / Fab Four - John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr
All of them have something to do with "one of the most widely recognized valuable albums in the world" known as the "Butcher cover" [from the album Yesterday and Today by the Beatles].[2]
According to Jordan Runtagh's review from Rolling Stone, “the cover remains one of the most misunderstood chapters in the band’s chronicle.”[3] No need to explain why the photo became bizarre. Simple, at first, the Beatles had a clean image, then it became bloody gory on the Butcher cover.
Because someone stole the raw photos from Bob, he was not aware when one of them got released as an album cover. But he admitted that "it was never meant to be the [front] cover… The back cover would have been the butcher picture…"[4]
Footnotes
[1] The World's Online Journal
[2] The Beatles Butcher Cover – Yesterday and Today
[3] Inside Beatles' Bloody, Banned 'Butcher' Cover
[4] Beatles in London Blog
*Originally posted on Narrative and Quora
Story entry by me
for October Fiction Contest by @blueeyes8960, @gardengnomepubs, and @whymonkey
Photo from lucyintheweb.net
